I have noticed that Echo Workstation can open most of my TI 11 images. However, there are a few it won't. I haven't tried to pin down the problem as I was doing other testing. TI 11 has (so far) not had any problems with my Echo images. In fact, in some cases, it seems to work better with Echo images than its own.

Even though they are around the same release date, I'm not sure they use exactly the same format for the image files.

Please be aware that Acronis True Image 11 Home and Acronis True Image Echo do indeed use somewhat different image formats. It's not guaranteed that Acronis True Image 11 Home will restore images created by Acronis True Image Echo correctly; and vice versa.

I'm just curious as this seems to be a common problem with Acronis software...

Why don’t you use some sort of standard image format? I don't care if it is proprietary or not, just make something standard so your micro-releases of software can actually still work with each other (or in some cases itself).

...just make something standard so your micro-releases of software can actually still work with each other...

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Since none of us can perfectly predict the future, it's only reasonable to expect that the format will need to be revised from time to time. The file format often changes from release to release in products like Quicken or Microsoft Money, but they build into new releases the ability to cope with the older formats. Where Acronis is concerned, it's obviously wise to hang onto rescue disks from older versions so long as you still retain files cut using them. Not exactly handy, but I suppose it contributes to keeping the product slender.

I understand that... but at a corporate level that is a bit unreasonable.

We have 10 different business units with dozens of different models of computers.

Add that all up, and having to either convert all those images every major/semi-major release or skip out on new (and needed) features is a big pain in the rear.

I went through several versions of ghost and was still able to deploy old images. Now granted Ghost wasn’t able to keep up to new hardware releases and that is why we switched to Acronis, but it seems to be plagued with as many issues, just different areas.

If they were to incorporate this into their software to make it cross-compatible over several versions, that would make this software that much more outstanding.

I don't know the story with the older TI non-home products but between the different versions of Home there has been very little difficulty reading older versions of archives. TI apparently guarantees that a new version will always read an archive from the previous version but history has shown their compatibility record to be much better than that.

Nobody can expect an old version to be able to read a new format but the backward compatibility implemented by TI is good. I also don't think it is totally reasonable to suggest that a Home version should be able to read a Server version's archives and vice versa.